Using the NEII vocabulary service

The NEII Environmental vocabulary service provides access to vocabulary content in multiple ways including through both NEII infrastructure and Research Vocabularies Australia (RVA) infrastructure, through human discoverable HTML content or through machine-readable application programming interfaces (APIs).

1. NEII Vocabulary Service Portal

Environmental vocabularies relevant to the National Environmental Information Programme are listed at the NEII Vocabulary Service Portal described by theme, title, custodian details and program. This includes vocabularies created by the NEII programme and partner vocabularies that have been registered with the NEII service.

2. NEII Linked Data Application Programming Interface (API)

The NEII programme hosts an instance of the SISSVoc linked data application programming interface making vocabulary content including terms and definitions available through a selection of endpoints. Users can navigate to SISSVoc content through the NEII Vocabulary Service Portal through individual vocabularies.

An example of the SISSVoc linked data API in HTML format for the NEII Observation Method vocabulary is available here.

NEII relevant environmental vocabularies available in the NEII portal are also all accessible through the Research Vocabularies Australia (RVA) portal. Vocabulary content remains identical with RVA portal offering complementary functionality. All RVA vocabularies can be browsed here. NEII programme-created vocabularies in RVA are available here.

4. Research Vocabularies Australia Widget

The RVA widget is functionality provided by Research Vocabularies Australia to allow vocabularies to be embedded in other software applications through JQuery code. RVA provides supporting documentation to integrate vocabularies into products such as data capture tools.

5. SPARQL Endpoints

Environmental vocabularies published through NEII and RVA are accessible through SPARQL1.1 Query endpoints. RVA details how to find and query these endpoints.

NEII and RVA vocabulary content synchronisation

Vocabularies available through the NEII portal and the NEII Linked Data API are a subset of RVA vocabularies with content synchronised nightly.